Pakistan Unlikely to Act on Bhutto Report, UN Envoy Haroon Says

April 17 (Bloomberg) -- Pakistan is unlikely to take steps
to address the security and judicial failures detailed in a
report on the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir
Bhutto, the nation’s envoy to the United Nations said.

“I have witnessed history in my country for the last 60
years and nothing is ever taken to conclusion,” Ambassador
Abdullah Hussain Haroon said in an interview today. “We have
had great trauma in Pakistan that did not lead to reform.”

Bhutto’s 2007 assassination might have been prevented had
the government and security forces taken adequate steps after
death threats were made against her, the UN-backed report said.
The subsequent investigation “lacked direction, was ineffective
and suffered from a lack of commitment to identify and bring all
of the perpetrators to justice,” the report said.

Haroon, 59, said the 65-page report, commissioned by UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and released yesterday, was a
“very clean factual picture” that was “well-conceived, well-written and well-intentioned” and contained no major errors.

The report called for “police reform measures” to
“operate in a structure of accountability for protecting the
rights of the individual.” It said Pakistan needs “strong and
effective intelligence services” and that the “democratic rule
of law in Pakistan could be greatly strengthened.”

Past Violence

Past violence in Pakistan, including the “loss of East
Pakistan,” the 1979 execution of Bhutto’s father, Prime
Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and military ruler General
Mohammad Zia ul-Haq’s death in a plane crash in 1988 all failed
to produce better leadership, Haroon said.

“We started off in undivided India a far more brilliant
small group of people who disengaged from India and went our way
knowing we could do better,” Haroon said. “We did in the first
25 years. Then we decided to go in mad directions and policies
and since then it has been all the way down.”

Pakistan now needs “strong leadership and incorruptible
leadership,” said Haroon, whose family owns the Pakistani media
group Dawn.

The government doesn’t need U.S. help building democracy as
suggested today in Washington by State Department spokesman P.J.
Crowley, Haroon said.

“We will continue to work with Pakistan, to make sure that
we build the institutions of democracy going forward and help
them defend them as well,” Crowley told reporters.

“I don’t think you can help anything,” Haroon said,
meaning the U.S. “When the U.S. was not a democracy, in the
1940s, 1950s and 1960s, we were a democracy,” he said,
referring to the disenfranchisement of African-Americans. “The
time it took you to get adult franchise we were already under
adult franchise. We may have retarded today but we were a full-fledged democracy.”

The U.S., Haroon said, should “observe the Bible which
they believe in” rather than “paying off people to be
corrupt.”